Confucius: the first humanist
The sage gave a vicious world its first code of ethics. Many listened, few acted.
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Pascal’s Wager; The Hammer of Witches; Socrates and the first ‘self’
I ONCE imagined Confucius hovering cross-legged above the squalor by the sheer power of his mind, a sage of unearthly wisdom in harmony with but not of the Earth.
In truth, Confucius (Kong Fuzi or Kongzi), who lived from c. 551 BCE to c. 479 BCE, was very much of this Earth yet far from being in harmony with it.
Confucius’ thoughts collided with a society he perceived as corrupt, violent, vulgar and decadent. Rather than revolt against it, or surrender to it, he took the hardest path conceivable: he tried to harmonise the world by recreating it in his image of what it should be.
‘The Master’ composed a…